There are a number of media players that are available, commercially or otherwise, to playback streams of digital data. Historically, players have been configured for peer-to-peer communications of data streams between a host and the player itself. And while streams of data have been tunneled across multicast nodes of an extended network using user datagram protocols (“UDP”) and the like, there remains a growing interest in multicasting streams to many players at once and traditional players are simply not compatible with existing multicast distribution schemes. The present invention satisfies this and other needs.